Find out what happened on our feature writer's first ski lesson at The Snow Centre

Find out what happened on our feature writer's first ski lesson at The Snow Centre

The older I get the more things I remove from my bucket list due to fear, not through any means of achievement.

In keeping with this mentality, I never thought I would learn to ski. I always wished I had learnt as a child because as I got older it no longer seemed like the best use of my time or money, and what if I went all the way up a mountain only to discover I didn’t like it?

This was before I visited the The Snow Centre in Hemel Hempstead, an indoor real snow slope. I saw it as my last chance to actually try doing something instead of shying away and I couldn’t be happier that I did.

I was nervous to begin with, that’s for sure. As I moonwalked into the snow-filled centre with giant boots on my feet and skis in hand, I gazed up at the slope ahead of me and wasn’t sure what I was doing there.

My instructor, Charlotte Ballard, immediately nods to the right where there was an area slightly smaller and much less steep. “We’ll start on the training slope,” she tells me.

On the other side of this area a small girl was having a lesson, she was perhaps three or four, going down the hill in the arms of an instructor, with little gloved hands on her knees.

“We’ll do that too,” Charlotte said and I relaxed for a split second before realising she was joking. The nerves came quickly back and I thought how much easier it must be to learn when you are young.

We start pretty low down the slope, side stepping a little way up and then coming down with Charlotte in front of me, holding my skis in position and instructing me to place my hands on my knees and on the peculiar way you need to bend your legs and push out your heels.

Before I set off to Hemel, a friend joked that they hoped I had been practising my squats, but the position of your feet and knees is completely dissimilar to squatting and took some concentration to hold in place. When I failed to hold position, my skis would face forward and I would pick up speed, lose control and sometimes fall over.

Overall though, the frustration of making a mistake was somewhat outweighed by the thrill factor of shooting down the slope – even if it is just for a few metres.

Once I had mastered – sort of – how to go down and how to stop, we moved onto going from side to side.

As the session went on, we began to go further and further up the slope, gradually perfecting this motion, which took a lot of concentration as you have to move each leg and each foot differently to the other, similar to turning a boat with its oars except you still need to keep the other leg in a strict position.

Sometimes I would do it well, remembering to move my hands from knee to knee in accordance with the direction I should be turning, and I would turn up to look at Charlotte with my arms joyfully in the air, other times I would do something wrong and shoot down the slope or completely lose my balance and fall.

Not letting me feel deflated for a single moment, Charlotte would pick out something I had done really well and praise me while beckoning me back up the slope.

Charlotte then said that we would go down together, her facing me so she could watch my movements closely. Considering how many times I had lost position during a turn and gone flying down I was worried about her safety.

I should have had more faith in her expertise; having her in front of me made me concentrate notably harder and we went down in perfect formation together, slowly and controlled.

Each time we shuffled onto the lift and made our way back up the slope we would come off a little higher until she asked if I felt able to start from the top. My nerves returned but I knew if I said no I would regret it later and so up we went, all the way to the top.

She assured me it was no steeper than where we had been going from, just above the half way point, but looking down the slope it certainly seemed steep to me.

She positioned herself backwards in front of me, I put my hands on my knees, took a few deep breaths and down we went. Not too slowly, not too fast, side to side, to side. I was beaming.

Up again we went, all the way to the top and then, on the last ride, down I went all by myself. Stopping at the bottom to throw my hands in the air, grinning from ear to ear and feeling very, very proud.

The Snow Centre offers private ski and snowboard lessons for children aged three and above as well as group lessons and sledging sessions for children aged four and above. If you or your children are already adept you can purchase lift passes for entry to the slopes.

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